Posted by Mark Mong

March 31, 2020

Psalm 13

To the leader. A Psalm of David.

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
    How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I bear pain[a] in my soul,
    and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

Consider and answer me, O Lord my God!
    Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,
and my enemy will say, “I have prevailed”;
    my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.

But I trusted in your steadfast love;
    my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord,
    because he has dealt bountifully with me.

In college, I worked for a summer in a factory.  The company took large rolls of metal and through a roll-forming process turned the flat metal into finished parts by the thousands.  We made car parts, appliance parts.  Any kind of part that could be made, we made it.  I was astounded about how an engineer could design a set of 20 rollers that incrementally would shape the flat metal gradually in stages, into a tube or channel or shaped part. Daily, we would use rolls and rolls of metal making thousands of parts that started with the raw untreated and unprocessed metal and turned it into a finished product, put into service.

The purpose of today’s Psalm is also about forming and processing a raw material into a finished product.  Through its three stages, the Psalm takes the raw material and processes it, molds it, shapes it, and works upon it, until it produces the finished product.  But while the tools and dies take metal and produce parts, this Psalm takes grief and turns it into joy.  This Psalm take the raw material of pain and suffering and processes it into hope.  The beauty and wonder of this Psalm is that it takes the deepest and most profound human sorrow and shapes that sorrow into faith and confidence. 

How long O Lord?  The Psalmist says it perfectly.  The Psalmist is stuck in the middle between God on one hand and trouble on the other.  But in this moment, God appears absent but the enemy, the trouble, seems to be ascending and greater in power.  The enemy, the sickness or the group of people surrounding the Psalmist is all that the author could see, and God was not in the picture.  So, the author asks,

        1 How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
            How long will you hide your face from me?
        2 How long must I bear pain in my soul,

and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
      How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

How Long indeed!  The Psalmist says it perfectly.  Caught between the might of an enemy and the absence of God, all the author could do was lament!  How long O Lord?

Are we not the same?  We are stuck in between like the Psalmist, between an enemy ascending, an enemy that only seems to grow stronger and more invasive by the day, and our God who has appeared to disappear, who appears to have forgotten us, who has turned his face away from us, who has ignored us in our pain and sorrow or who has allowed this virus to prevail over us.  Like the Psalmist all we can do in our anxiety and in our despair is to do as the Psalmist does and to lament.  And so, we add our voice to the Psalmist, How long O Lord?  How long in quarantine O Lord?  How long will your people die?  How long must we suffer pain and sorrow?  How long must we suffer the fools in charge?  How long must this enemy prevail upon us and over us?  All we can do is lament and moan, How long O Lord?  How long indeed!

But while we have sorrow and despair aplenty as does the Psalmist, the point of the Psalm is to form and process that sorrow and despair into something else.  So, while the largest section of the Psalm is the lament, speaking about our worry and anxiety, the Psalmist is led into prayer.  How long O Lord becomes help me O Lord. 

        3 Consider and answer me, O Lord my God!
            Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,
        4 and my enemy will say, “I have prevailed”;
             my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.

Grief and sorrow are then motivations for prayer begging and pleading for help.  The pain and despair cause the Psalmist to reach out and to throw themselves onto the mercy of God.  “How long” becomes “help!”  

If the point of the lament is to move us from the whirlwind of emotions and worries to prayer, then our own “How Longs,” need to become a motivation and an attitude towards prayer.  Our “How long” lead us to our “Helps!”  Consider me O Lord my God.  Remember me God, don’t forget or turn away from me.  Give light to my eyes.  Lord I can’t see the end of this.  Lord I can’t understand how or why this is happening.  Or I will sleep the sleep of death, Lord all I see is my own grave fast approaching.  And my enemy will say, “I have prevailed”; my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.  All I can see O Lord is the virus winning and you not even trying.  The point of our own laments is to lead us to pray our own prayers asking God for Grace and Mercy.

But the Psalmist is not finished.  The Psalmist has lamented, that lament turned into a prayer, but that prayer has also formed into something else.  The lament became a prayer and the prayer became a quiet certainty.  The many phrases of emotion become two phrases of certainty. 

      But I trusted in your steadfast love;
            my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
        6 I will sing to the Lord,
            because he has dealt bountifully with me.

After uttering his prayer, the Psalmist is reminded.  The Psalmist is reminded of the steadfast love of God in which a person having such trust is never put to shame.  The Psalmist’s heart will rejoice in being delivered.  The Psalmist shall sing to the Lord, because God will deal bountifully with him.  What started off as angst and agitation has now become a calm, worshipful faith.  The process is complete, the finished product has been fully processed.  The worry and despair have become faith and hope.

What if our lament becomes our prayer and what if our prayer becomes this same calm, worshipful faith?  “How long” becomes “help” and “help” becomes “and yet I put my trust in you O God,” because of your steadfast love which nor virus can slay, because you will deal bountifully with me, which no virus can thwart, because of your salvation, which no virus can become an obstacle to.  At long last the process in us in complete, our sorrow and worry has become faith and hope.  We still are stuck in between the virus and God, but our present circumstances can be accepted, because our difficult present will become a joyous future. 

Therefore my friends, in this difficult moment when we have no answers to our questions, when we don’t see how long this trouble will last, when we see an enemy rising and our God quiet and absent, let us do as the Psalmist does.  Let us lament our frustrations, because our laments will become our prayers asking for help, and our prayers for help will become a quiet and confident faith in God, who will keep God’s promises in God’s time and in God’s results.  May our sorrow and frustrations be transformed into a quiet and certain, faith and hope.  Amen.

Prayer

O God of steadfast love and deliverance, we thank you and praise you for your Grace and Power freely given in Jesus Christ.  Through the work of your Holy Spirit help us to lament our emotions, knowing our laments leads us to prayer, and knowing that prayer will lead us to quiet trust in you.  In Jesus’ Name we pray.  Amen.


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